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Thursday, 13 May 2010

The Staffordshire Hoard: Warfare, Aggression and the Use of Trophies

When I was writing this paper I was listening to Jethro Tull’s in my view (and this may be the most controversial thing I have to say today) under-rated 1982 album ‘Broadsword and the Beast’, to the track ‘Broadsword’ and Ian Anderson’s command to “bring me my broadsword, and a cross of gold as a talisman”: a suitable – prescient even – theme-tune for the Staffordshire Hoard.

When Helen kindly invited me to come and talk about the Hoard, responding particularly to the idea that this is a ‘trophy hoard’, my immediate response was typically irreverent. I thought of the character Tiny in Sven Hassel’s WWII novels – SS porn if you will – who goes around knocking the gold teeth out of dead Russians, and envisaged a grizzled Mercian veteran wandering the battlefield knocking the pommels off the swords of dead foes. I thought about conkers; same vet holding up pommels from his collection. ‘See this one? He was a twenty-er.’ But these are clearly not the trophies of one warrior. 86 swords? That’s a lot of notches on your scabbard. One might imagine a particularly mean son of a bitch going on twenty campaigns during his career, making four ‘kills’ per campaign. But this only counts wealthy warriors with expensive swords; as Prince Harry says in the very first episode of Black Adder ‘we don’t count peasants except in the event of a tie.’ I think we can safely rule out an individual’s ‘trophy hoard’. If so, we must consider how this collection could otherwise have worked as a hoard of trophies as such and, for me, that line of thought casts doubt on the idea.

I am going to discuss what the Hoard might contribute to the study of warfare and how our understanding of early medieval warfare helps us think about the Staffordshire Hoard. While it was politically necessary to say so, the Staffordshire Hoard does not revolutionise our knowledge of early medieval warfare but what it does do is no less important; interestingly, even startlingly, it confirms what might have remained plausible hypotheses. Obviously there are two ways of considering the hoard; first as its constituent elements and second as a material cultural artefact in itself. Like most of us, I imagine, I find it considerably more perplexing in the second sense than in the first, which is what I am going to start with.

***

I begin with numbers, primarily the hoary debate on the size of early medieval armies. If it does nothing else, the Staffordshire Hoard knocks the notion of the thirty-six-man Anglo-Saxon army on the head, for good. I have argued for well over a decade now that this theory was based on a misunderstanding of Ine’s Laws, clause 13.1 , but it continued to be referred to, even by scholars as formidable as the late Tim Reuter. Here we have indisputable, hard evidence that that position can no longer be held. Otherwise the Staffordshire Hoard represents the remains of nearly four whole armies – an ‘army group’ in WWII terminology – which must be nonsense.

If I understand correctly that these swords are revealed by elaborate, gold-and-garnet or otherwise finely decorated sword-fittings and pommels then we surely have the upper end of the military equipment scale. Such things could relate to the equipment of a noble retinue. You might dispute that but bear with me for now. In his bid for the West Saxon throne in the 780s Cyneheard’s followers – his retinue I’ve always assumed – supposedly numbered 84, about the same as the number of pommels in the hoard. Maybe this is the order of magnitude for an ealdorman’s personal following? One must assume that the Hoard was not the only collection of such matériel in Mercia, implying much more weaponry like this in circulation.

Let’s play a little numbers game; I don’t want to hang any weight on the details. Let’s assume, taking a fairly maximalist line of what the hoard represents, that this was a quarter of all such weapons circulating in Mercia at one time. That would imply about 500 swords like this at the Mercian king’s disposal. Wealthy warriors had more than one sword but that could still equip 300 men or more. It surely represents the equipment of the army’s upper echelons. What sort of percentage of the whole? A half? A third? A tenth? I think the last ratio more likely than the first but, however one plays this numbers game, the implication is that Mercian armies numbered in the region of at least the low thousands. On the basis of the Hoard’s implications and assuming that not everyone went on every campaign, 5,000 men must be feasible for a serious force. The only way of avoiding that conclusion is to assume that these were pretty much all of the flash sword-fittings of the whole Mercian army … and someone must have been very annoyed with whoever lost or buried them… Even if you think that the Hoard represents loot, this sort of speculation will still lead you ultimately to the same sort of conclusion.

If an ealdorman’s retinue was the sort of size represented by the hoard, it is interesting to consider the Mercian king Ludeca’s defeat in East Anglia in 827. He had at least five ealdormen with him, because five got killed (fill in some mental caveats about judging the scale of a Mercian defeat from a West Saxon chronicle, but stay with me). If there were over 5 ealdormen and their retinues, plus the king and his (surely larger?), plus the general levy or fyrd we come to the same sort of order of magnitude for a significant army.

Nicholas Brooks’ heavy-weight 1979 rebuttal of Peter Sawyer’s minimalist thesis proposed this sort of size for ninth-century armies, which I supported in my book, at least for the period up to about the ninth century, so that’s all very gratifying. The Hoard makes it very difficult to argue seriously for significantly smaller armies.

My second topic, under the general heading of numbers, concerns armament. The preceding discussion implies that swords were not uncommon. If the weapons implied by the Hoard do represent the upper end of the market, then we should surely envisage at least a couple of thousand swords circulating among the Mercian warrior class. One occasionally sees it argued that swords were rare because they were expensive; I have never accepted the rarity – they were expensive – and the Staffordshire Hoard implicitly supports me. It suggests, overall, that the Mercian army was larger and better equipped than has sometimes been thought. One can only avoid accepting both of those points by emphasising one of them further. In other words, to counter the idea that the Hoard implies well-equipped troops you must argue that the armies were even bigger than I have suggested, and you can only defend smaller armies by maintaining that Mercian warriors were typically even better equipped. This is not trivia. It matters for how you think about warfare’s scale, its social and political role, the resources mobilised for its support, and ultimately about the nature of Mercia and its kingship.

***

The Hoard also speaks to the nature of warfare itself. In Warfare and Society I argued, against a common view which claims that sieges were the main means of deciding the outcome of warfare, that the period 450-900 was one when pitched battles were unusually common. I drew attention not just to the frequency with which battles are mentioned in narrative sources but also to the need to see warfare in a broader, socio-economic context. There were factors concerning social structure and the élite’s dependence upon the army and military affairs for its legitimacy that pushed towards more frequent battlefield confrontation. Moreover, highly-developed fortification is notably absent between the Roman Empire’s fragmentation and the ninth century; siege-warfare was not the elaborate science it would be later. This is not surprising. Settlements, other than monasteries perhaps, were not the foci for wealth that they would become. If loot and booty oiled the cogs of early medieval politics, which they did, though not to the extent that is often surmised, it was not going to be yielded through the seizure of sixth- to eighth-century towns.

The best way to make a significant profit from warfare was to defeat the enemy army in battle, because early medieval armies took their wealth with them. More and more the lesson is underlined that, particularly in the immediately post-imperial centuries, people wore their wealth, and that was nowhere truer than with warriors, except that they also rode theirs. The price of a warhorse remained fairly (if you’ll excuse the pun) stable at about 10 solidi across western Europe between 450 and 900. It’s difficult to know what that really meant, the solidus usually being a somewhat abstract unit of account; suffice it to say that people swapped reasonably sized parcels of land for horses. These were then given lavishly decorated harnesses, bits, bridles and saddles – some of this seems to be represented in the Hoard. This, it’s worth pointing out, was a hugely risky investment; horses die distressingly easily on campaign. Looting the average Anglo-Saxon village – as we currently understand it – was not going to recoup such a loss.

. An early medieval warrior’s own accoutrements didn’t cost a year’s income from a whole village, as sometimes claimed, but they certainly didn’t come cheap. They were adorned and decorated as much as possible. The sometimes-seen notion that things like the Sutton Hoo helmet represent ‘parade armour’ is misconceived. The early medieval warrior was a frightening and imposing, a glittering and plumed figure. I don’t doubt that in their own way these were every bit the dangerous strutting dandies that were their descendants in the Hussar regiments of a millennium later. The Staffordshire Hoard’s items emphasise this; the almost casual gilding and ornamentation of just about every object or surface that could be so decorated. The Hoard fascinates, it intrigues, but it does not surprise me.

What is maybe more important, following my earlier numbers game, is just how much of the surplus from the agriculture of earlier Anglo-Saxon England was being – excuse the pun – ploughed into the dandification of warriors. When you think of that, the lack of impressive settlements, say, becomes easier to understand. It also confirms the wealth of Mercia. We ought not to be surprised about where the biggest find of Anglo-Saxon gold was located.

Battles were a huge risk – early medieval people knew that – but if you won the rewards were enormous. Taking an enemy army’s horses, let alone its weaponry and armour, would represent a major windfall. Furthermore we know of the lavish tents that kings took on campaign. Kings took their treasuries with them. Charles the Bald, one of the most interesting, if also the least lucky, of early medieval commanders lost his royal finery once to the Bretons and once to his nephew Louis the Younger, as well as temporarily losing three crowns and fine jewellery on a Viking campaign. By the ninth century, and probably earlier, merchants, like the shield-sellers who followed Charles the Bald’s army in 877, accompanied armies and their wares too were looted by victorious troops. Finally there were the elaborate banners that armies carried, of whose capture, as later, especial mention and celebration were made. Most meaningful early medieval discussions of trophies concern banners. After his 892 victory over the Vikings on the river Dyle, King Arnulf sent sixteen captured banners to be paraded through Bavaria as proof of his success. Two pictures illustrate the concept and its timelessness. The one thing in the Hoard that might have served as a trophy is the cross, and that has been smashed up.

The extent of risk involved in battles is probably one reason why mechanisms seem to have existed to restrict, normalise, even ritualise, the conduct of endemic early medieval warfare. For warfare was endemic. Mercia fought forty-two recorded wars between 600 and 850, and recall that that is almost certainly only a record of the serious outbreaks that their enemies thought worth remembering. Even with these limitations on our knowledge, half of the Mercian kings in this period fought such a major war within two years of their accession, most of the rest within four. Such was the frequency of warfare that if you were defeated one year, you might expect to take back some or even most of what you lost a year or so later. Serious wars came when this sort of tit for tat failed to keep things flowing.

That is the most important thing about loot and booty – trophies if you like. You don’t hang on to them; you keep them circulating. John, a nobleman on the Spanish march, sent the pick of the loot he took in a minor victory over the Moors – a fine horse, a jewelled sword and a mail shirt – to Louis, Charlemagne’s son, in return for which Charlemagne granted him lands on the frontier. The point of booty was to give it away, often but, as we’ve just seen, not always to one’s followers. As everyone knows, the dragon in Beowulf is the figure of a bad ruler because he hoards, he literally sits on, his treasure. This is one reason why I can’t see the Staffordshire Hoard as a ‘trophy hoard’.

Another is the composition of the hoard. It might be salutary to remind ourselves that for all the intrinsic interest and importance – to us – of the items recovered, to early medieval people the important bit of a sword wasn’t the bright, shiny pommel and scabbard fittings but what we see as the rusty length of iron: what they saw as the long, sharp pointy bit that you killed people with. When people talk about important gifts or possessions that might, in a way, have functioned as trophies, it is as swords, not bits of decoration. Let’s remember what an impressive feat of blacksmithing a sword-blade was, and how much it was valued. Frans Theuws, someone who has really thought hard and seriously about sword chronologies, said that, because blade design stayed more or less the same, an early medieval sword itself is pretty much undatable; all the things that we can pin a date to are in most important regards the ephemera, the things you can change: scabbard, hilt, pommel. For the purposes of the chronological association of its elements, a sword isn’t a sealed context. And you add a new pommel and hilt to a good blade; you don’t find a new blade to fit to a nice pommel.

To think about what the Hoard might represent then let’s first return to the idea of a retinue. In the light of what I have discussed so far, an ealdorman with a sizeable military following, such as I have mentioned, might not want simply to equip it functionally. He would want it to look impressive too. When Wilfrid formed his own retinue he did not just provide it with horses and weapons but with clothes too. When I started thinking about the Staffordshire Hoard, one idea that came to me was that this might similarly be thought of in terms of the ‘ornamentation’ of a medieval retinue’s appearance that would reflect on their lord – possibly even identify him: horse-harness decoration, pommels and scabbard fittings, elements of helmets, shield-fittings. It would make an impressive show, one aimed at competing with the appearance of other retinues.

The problem with this theory, though – and others – is why it would all be in one place. It does not explain the Hoard as ‘artefact-in-itself’. The absence of buckles is also, in my view, fatal for the idea. Hypothetically, it could nevertheless represent what a lord might have to so furnish new recruits or further reward old ones. It could be booty collected by his retinue and returned to the lord for those purposes. It might be a ‘treasury’ of – literally – political capital collected, deposited and not retrieved in the course of Mercia’s turbulent internal political history. Maybe. These are no more than wild stabs in the dark.

The Staffordshire Hoard underlines just how badly the archaeological record serves us sometimes, by its nature. Our knowledge of early medieval helmets is based upon high-end examples deposited intact in graves but the Hoard suggests to me that ordinary helmets might often have been as much chronological mélanges as swords: one cheek piece from one helmet and the other from another, a crest-band added from a third. Similarly, it reinforces a similar point about revealing the wealth of the early Middle Ages. Even if he fundamentally misunderstood the point of the burial ritual, James Campbell was right that the Sutton Hoo treasure is small beer compared to what the written sources tell us kings had in their treasuries. Matthias will underline that. In weight, the Staffordshire Hoard gold, the largest find of gold in Anglo-Saxon England, only amounts to about 800 solidi. You can’t simply move from the solidus-as-coin to the solidus-as-unit-of-account that I mentioned earlier but if we pretend briefly that you can, the Staffordshire Hoard would by you 80 horses. That makes it more than just a tidy sum, but remember that to equip a decent army would cost in excess of fifty Staffordshire hoards.

I wonder if the Staffordshire Hoard isn’t much more similar to a coin hoard than has thus far been suggested: a collection of units of bullion that could be used in certain transactions – maybe political ones: again, a sort of treasury. I note the deliberate cutting up of pieces and I’d like to know more, when the work is done, about the weights of the components. I wonder if it isn’t a sort of ‘hack gold’. Or perhaps it is there as raw material, to be melted down and reworked into more fashionable objects and ornaments: or coins.

The more I consider it, as with my point about swords and trophies, the more I come round to the idea that, however we might admire and value the Staffordshire Hoard – in monetary as well as intellectual terms – it might actually have been rather less of a big deal at the time it was deposited. That, to me, makes it, if anything, more – not less – interesting and important.